Moon For Sale

by Jeff Pollard

  Kingsley enters the Sol2Go with cameras following. A glass wall separates the convenience store from the battery charging station inside. K approaches the glass wall, away from the registers. On the other side of the glass you can see the robotic arms going in and out and the batteries coming and going in various stages. A pair of Sol2Go employees man the cash register as well as monitor the batteries and equipment. “And there's the behind the scenes view,” K says.

  “And how much does it cost to fill up your tanks?” a reporter asks.

  “The card bills you at the end of the month, and it's quite cheap. It depends on the size and number of batteries you have, the model of the car, and of course we need some money to maintain such a large fleet of batteries that need replacement. But it comes out to around ten dollars a change, which I think you'll find compares favorably to filling your car with gasoline. Plus you can charge your car at home for whatever it costs you to buy electricity. And if you buy a Tezla in the next three months, we'll throw in a full year of Sol2Go service for free. And now if you'll excuse me, I need to go empty my tanks. Still haven't automated that.”

  Back outside, the posse assembles around Kingsley as they wait for the last cars to get their batteries changed. While hanging out with fans, admirers, and paparazzi, Kingsley notices a familiar black Suburban sitting on the side of the road a hundred yards away, conspicuously keeping its distance.

  “And how many of these stations do you plan to build?” a reporter asks, but Kingsley is distracted, staring at the Suburban.

  “Kingsley?”

  “Hmm?” K snaps out of it.

  “And how many of these stations do you plan to build?” the reporter repeats.

  “On Earth?” K asks.

  “Can I change this now?” K asks, reaching for the sound system controls in the new Tezla 3.

  “You said we'd split the music control fifty-fifty,” Caroline replies, swatting his hand away from the huge touch screen in the center dash.

  “And now it's gotta be my turn,” K says.

  “We're not even through New Mexico yet,” Caroline says. “Last I checked, we're nowhere near close to halfway across the states.”

  “Yeah, well, I agreed to the fifty-fifty thing before I heard this '60s French soft-crap-rock.

  “This is Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg!” Caroline protests.

  “And?”

  “This is like quintessential summer-of-love music, it's classic.”

  “I've never heard of it,” K replies.

  “I cannot believe you've never heard 'Je T'aime. . . Moi Non Plus' or 'L'amour.' You should like this, this stuff is like as sexy as music gets.”

  “They're making orangutang sounds,” K protests.

  “It's a metaphor.”

  “I'm changing it,” K says, darting his hand back toward the touch screen, only to be blocked again. He then resorts to changing the music with the wheel mounted controls.

  “Alright, be that way,” Caroline says, “but this is going to be a loooong trip.”

  Kingsley flips through satellite radio stations, stopping at NPR. “It sounds like there will be congressional hearings on the F-35 program, and maybe even more broadly. The more we hear, the more it sounds like all military appropriations are being investigated. I mean, when you have members of congress doing things like making the Army buy tanks they don't want, you know there are back room deals going on.”

  “The rumor I keep hearing is that subpoenas are going out this week.”

  “And who is being subpoenaed?”

  “It's hard to say who exactly is going to appear, but if its true that there will be a televised congressional hearing, this story is only going to get bigger.”

  “Yes,” Kingsley says, pumping his fist. “Maybe this whole damn military-industrial-porkplex will come crashing down.”

  “You really think so?” Caroline asks.

  “I can hope right?”

  “If anything they'll pin this on a scapegoat and keep on doing business as usual. I mean the military-industrial-complex ain't exactly new. They've survived so long for a reason.”

  “Everything has to end sometime,” K says.

  The Tezla posse rolls into Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico at four in the afternoon, timed so they can witness a Hummingbird II test as well as a SpaceShipTwo flight. The flock of cars, looking like a Tezla commercial, swoops into the Spaceport parking garage which is fitted with car charging stations.

  As Kingsley and Caroline walk out of the parking garage, K walks to the edge of the open-air facility, looking out from his vantage several stories in the air, he spots the black Suburban conspicuously keeping its distance, sitting on the side of the street heading into the Spaceport.

  “What is it?” Caroline asks.

  “Nothing,” Kingsley plays it off and they continue toward the hangars and the tarmac. Kingsley's posse of electric car owners make their way to the flight line and witness a batch of space tourists, nervous as all get out, boarding a SpaceShipTwo slung under a mothership. Richard Branson is there to shake their hands before they enter the ship. WhiteKnightTwo taxis and takes off. A Virgin Galactic employee gets the attention of the posse and begins a tour.

  “You guys want a drink?” Richard asks K and Caroline.

  The three of them sit at a window overlooking the spaceport. “Nice posse,” Richard says as they watch the tour beneath them.

  “Is that what you call a flock of electric car owners?” Caroline asks.

  “How about a Tesla,” K suggests.

  “A Tesla of Tezlas?” Richard isn't so sure. “How about a battery?”

  “A capacitance,” K says.

  “How about a nerdle?” Caroline suggests.

  “Where's the Dream Chaser?” K asks.

  “I think they're doing the last flight-test today,” Richard replies.

  “I know they are, but where is it?” K asks.

  In fact the Dream Chaser was above 40,000 feet, riding the other mothership to the edge of space. The Dream Chaser was conducting the final test before it was to be launched on an Eagle 9 in a few months. They had performed more than a dozen tests already. The drop tests started at relatively low speeds and altitudes, gliding from the WhiteKnightTwo mothership to a gentle landing back at the spaceport. Each test took the DC higher and faster. The last four tests of the Dream Chaser would not be unpowered. Instead it would fire up its rocket engines and ascend even higher and faster. These rocket engines would be used to place the DC in it's final orbit on an Eagle 9 launch, but when dropped from a WhiteKnightTwo, these engines would only accelerate the Dream Chaser into a relatively low parabolic arc. The DC was designed to be a full-fledged spaceship capable of staying docked to a space station for up to a year and then returning from orbital velocity. This meant that the DC was significantly heavier than SpaceShipTwo, which was only ever designed to fly on fifteen minute jaunts into the upper atmosphere and no more. So the Dream Chaser's engines couldn't accelerate this heavier frame quite as high or fast as the lighter SpaceShipTwo could go, but the two test-pilots in the DC would get upwards of four minutes of weightlessness on this final flight.

  “I don't really understand why they have been doing this testing for what, two years? How many tests do you need to do?” Branson asks.

  “And then they're flying it unmanned twice,” K adds.

  “I mean, grow some balls already, right?” Richard says.

  “Grow some balls?” K asks.

  “Dick and his balls,” Caroline adds before sipping on a martini.

  “This testing regime will give them data on the Dream Chaser from super-sonic speeds and fifty miles up all the way to a landing,” K says. “The Space Shuttle flight testing was much more restricted, only ever getting as high and as fast as the 747 carrier aircraft could take it, but never going super-sonic or very high. The first time the shuttle would ever fly at high speeds or altitudes was when it
re-entered for the first time at the end of STS-1. And there were humans on it the first time it ever went supersonic, ever launched, ever re-entered.”

  “And it takes balls to do that,” Richard adds.

  “The same kind of balls that say go ahead and launch, the cold won't be a problem?” Caroline asks.

  “I mean think of it,” K says. “The first ever controlled re-entry of a winged vehicle from orbital speeds was done on the first shuttle flight with pilots in the seats. You might think they would have made a small, perhaps Dream Chaser-sized, space plane and flown it unmanned before they set about spending tens of billions and staking the entire space agency on a massive and untested space plane. But NASA had the balls to go for it, and perhaps it paid off and showed that they could do anything.”

  “See that's what I'm talking about,” Branson says. “Back then they just went out and did things. Apollo, the Concorde, the Shuttle. Look at us now, we need fifteen years of feasibility studies, five years cutting through red-tape and getting permits, it's exhausting. Why don't they do it more like NASA, with balls.”

  “Perhaps those balls blinded them to the fact that they were not invincible,” K says.

  “Those must be very big balls,” Caroline adds. “How big do the balls have to be to obscure invincibility, which is after all, not a physical object.”

  “After STS-1 when they first tried to re-use a space shuttle,” Kingsley ignores Caroline's question, “they discovered that the heat shield needed to be completely overhauled and the vehicle nearly totally rebuilt before it could fly again. Other than Challenger and Columbia, this was the worst moment in the program. They got the thing back and it was not in good shape, and I guarantee there were engineers in there that understood how much trouble they were in. This inability to reuse the shuttle easily nor quickly doomed the shuttle program from the start. It would never be able to turn around and fly again on the timescale NASA had promised, and their guess of 700-plus missions in 12 years would end up being 135 missions in 31 years. Perhaps a better test program would have shown them that their planned shuttle would not be able to live up to those unrealistic expectations and they would have designed it better, fixed those problems, or abandoned the program before they committed to it.”

  “I still think those balls were good for us,” Richard says.

  “Go-fever it's called,” Caroline says. “I mean, they're NASA. They went to the Moon, they thought they could do anything. They screwed up bad.”

  “Yeah, but not for a lack of balls,” Richard reiterates.

  “If it shows anything it's that you don't lock in a final design before you have some prototypes to really test the things. Just look at SpacEx, we want to make some re-usable rockets, but you didn't see us trying to re-use the very first one. It's baby steps. And soon enough those baby steps will get us to our goal, and then we can lock in the final design from there, rather than locking in some design that works on a computer and then trying to Jerry-rig it to work for the next three decades.”

  “But every baby step costs money, and you can only take so many baby steps before you run out of it.”

  “Yeah but with SpacEx, these aren't just test flights, our intermediate forms are usable products, so they pay for their own development.”

  “Theoretically. As long as you have enough customers,” Branson says ominously.

  “Well, we're working on that, right Caroline?”

  “Sorry, you're talking about your brilliant designs again, I think I lost consciousness,” Caroline replies.

  “He does that,” Branson adds. “What were we even talking about in the first place?”

  “Average testicle diameter,” Caroline says, certain. “Because most men know they aren't invincible, so the average testicle can't totally obscure it. But when you put men on the Moon and your testicles triple in size, then it's harder to see.”

  “So how's business?” K says simply.

  “It's doing alright,” Richard replies. “I do have a little problem right now that's quite annoying.”

  “What's that?” K asks.

  “Zero-G,” Richard says derisively. Zero-G is a U.K. based up-start competitor also offering sub-orbital parabolic flights. Zero-G's spaceship is called the Jaguar and works differently than SpaceShipTwo. The Jaguar has no mothership, and instead takes off from the runway by itself. It has a single jet engine and two small rocket engines. The Jaguar is a small ship, holding only two people. It flies up to altitude on its jet and then activates the rockets to take it on it's short trip into space. Since it doesn't need a mothership, the Jaguar is theoretically easier to use and has a faster turnaround time than SpaceShipTwo. However, the downsides to not having a larger mothership to take the rocket up to altitude are that it has to be able to ascend to altitude on its own power, which means it has to carry that heavy jet engine. This limits the size of the ship to one pilot and one passenger and also means that it doesn't fly as fast or as high as SpaceShipTwo. So while the Jaguar does cross the line and reach space and achieve zero-g, its lone passenger only gets seven minutes of weightlessness, compared to the fifteen minutes on SpaceShipTwo. Zero-G had opened for business only a month earlier.

  “They're eating big time into our manifest. They shouldn't, but they are,” Richard says. “Seven minutes, in a tiny cockpit, just you and the pilot, there's not even room to get out of your seat and move around in that thing. Yeah, it's cheaper, but SpaceShipTwo is so much better. It's as if people can't tell the difference and think space is space.”

  “Tell me about it,” K mutters.

  “Oh come on, I'm not stealing your passengers,” Richard says.

  “Whatever, you know how many times I've had to explain the difference between orbital and sub-orbital?”

  “Fifteen minutes or a month, it can't be that hard to explain,” Richard replies.

  “Fifteen minutes or seven minutes,” K replies sarcastically.

  “But the size of the cockpit and the freedom of getting out of your seat and being able to go up with people you know,” Richard replies quickly.

  “You know what we should do,” Caroline says distantly. She doesn't look for or even notice if her interjection has gotten anyone's attention. “We should visit Hannah and the baby while we're in New York.”

  “Oh dear god,” K mutters.

  “Whose baby?” Richard asks.

  “His,” Caroline says with a wry smile.

  “I see,” Richard says.

  The nerdle of Tezla drivers had the unique opportunity to witness a Dream Chaser unpowered landing, followed shortly by a SpaceShipTwo landing. Kingsley joined Richard as they welcomed the world's newest batch of astronauts back from the edge of space with a passport stamping ceremony. Kingsley then went into salesman mode and corralled the new astronauts and led them toward the Hummingbird II pad to witness a test flight of the vertical take-off and landing 1/4th scale demonstrator.

  “What a showoff,” Richard says under his breath as he and Caroline tag along. “Don't you ever get tired of him rambling about reusable rockets. Reusable this, reusable that. What a crap salesman. They want to hear grand things, they want to voyage to the stars. Reusability is about as exciting as a trip to Birmingham.”

  “Which Birmingham?” Caroline asks.

  “Does it matter?”

  A mile away, the Hummingbird II powers up. The plan for this test is for it to ascend to an altitude of 10 kilometers, hover for a moment, then shut down and fall, totally unpowered, before re-igniting the engines and performing the “hover slam” maneuver (that's the new, less scary name for the “suicide burn”) that would bring it to a soft landing. This was the first test in which the engines would be turned off and restarted in flight, a maneuver that would be necessary if Eagle 9s were ever to make powered landings.

  “I should be charging finder's fees for this,” Richard mumbles. “He's just using me to get these people.”

  “What do you care, t
hey're already flown on SpaceShipTwo,” Caroline says.

  “Yeah but if he didn't come along and tell them there's something bigger and more expensive, then they'd just keep coming back here. Instead they're gonna drop twenty million on his thing and not come back to me.”

  “As if there's anyone riding a SpaceShipTwo that hasn't heard of SpacEx or Kingsley.”

  The Hummingbird II blasts into the sky, riding a pillar of fire. It takes several seconds for the sound of the engine to reach them at this distance, surprising the customers. Kingsley excitedly jumps, pumping his fist, rooting on the rocket like it's about to win the super bowl.

  “What are you still doing with this clown?”

  “He's not a clown,” Caroline replies.

  “He's a bit of a spastic,” Richard says.

  “He's a nerd,” Caroline says defensively.

  “What was the thing about his baby, what were you talking about earlier?”

  “It's a long story,” Caroline replies.

  “Why don't you have a baby yet?”

  “What?”

  “I used to know you pretty well Caroline, and I'm very surprised that you don't have any kids yet. I'm not sure what you're waiting for.”

  “Oh you know me, just waiting for the right dick to come along, Richard.”

  “Right, makes sense,” Richard replies, “I mean, who would want kids with Kingsley, he's probably terrible with kids.”

  “How would you know?” Caroline asks.

  “My dad gave me a piece of advice about judging the character of men. Richard, he said, men are usually good with either kids or strippers, not both.”